America is losing in the battle to lead the Clean Power Revolution, which is the largest shift of wealth the world has ever seen. Earth's largest industry, the energy industry, is shifting inexorably from coal/oil to solar/wind—just like previous centuries that ushered in similar transitions: from wood, whale oil and horses to coal, kerosene, and oil. The transition is inevitable, but America is losing—badly. Electricity costs are rising steadily, and oil and natural gas are unpredictable and generally increasing over time. Climate change damage to the economy is rising even faster, and common sense tells us that fossil fuels exacerbate climate change
Renewable energy is now equal to or less than the cost of fossil fuel generated electricity. Electricity to fuel vehicles is cheaper than gas even if gas were less than $1.00 per gallon. Wind and solar are booming, adding tens of billions of dollars per year of newly installed projects at a 30%+ average compound annual growth rate. Studies show significant benefits to the US economy of clean power, including new jobs (wind turbine technician was the fastest growing job in the USA in 2015), efficiency gains, reduced health costs due to cleaner water and air and reduction of the rapidly increasing costs to the economy of climate change.
Wind & solar power plants now provide electricity that's cheaper than new or existing fossil fuels power plants. However, much of this potential clean, affordable resource remains unavailable to most people due to the lack of suitable transmission lines. Building the infrastructure to transmit and store this power is slow.
Existing tunnel boring machines are slow and expensive. Bertha is one of the world's largest tunnel boring machines. The speed of Bertha is about 10 m per day. It is also huge, at 17.5 m wide and nearly 100 m long, requiring assembly at each job site and then disassembly to move it to the next location, as well as needing large slurry pipes and a 2.7 km long conveyor belt to move soil out of the way by injecting water and chemicals in the broken soil until it runs into a soft paste slurry. Furthermore, such tunnel boring machines are expensive to operate. Bertha uses 18.6 MW of power and 25 people to keep it operating. The design for Bertha originated in 1825 by inventor Marc Isambard Brunel. Bertha stalled in December 2013 and required substantial repairs, delaying a tunnel project in Seattle Wash. by about 3 years.